Twitter Users Sad

“We’re getting progressively unhappier according to a recent University of Vermont study, which analyzed more than 46 billion words tweeted by 63 million users around the globe. ‘We’re at our lowest point now in four years as far as our measure of happiness through Twitter goes,’ says Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at UVM and the lead author of the study. The 46 billion words Dodds and his team analyzed varied widely — everything from ‘pancakes’ to ‘suicide’ — which they then compared to scores given to the most common 10,000 words in the English language. For instance, a word such as ‘laughter’ earned an average ‘happiness score’ of 8.5 out of 9, while the word ‘terrorist’ got 1.30.”